How Do We Balance?
“Plants don’t have a brain because they’re not going anywhere.
And if you’re not going anywhere, you don’t even need to know where you are.”
Robert Sylwester
Balance is Important
Balance piqued my interest after reading Atul Gawande’s book, Being Mortal, a couple of years ago. Sixty percent of the Americans who fall each year face life changing consequences — either ending up in a nursing home or never being able to walk again. He writes that there are three determining factors for a person’s risk of falling: poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness. While straightforward, I found the risk factors incredibly frightening due to how many people in the U.S. alone are likely affected by them.
It occurred to me that balance training isn’t included in the mainstream conversation about fitness and physical health. Being “fit” as defined by a healthy heart doesn’t account for what happens when we need to take a bigger step off the curb than usual or bypass a fallen object on the ground. I began paying attention to constant references being made about older people and balance. Many of my group class students even only in their 40’s and 50’s are very concerned with maintaining their balance for the years to come. Coinciding with my curiosity, I acquired several balance-challenged clients over the past couple of years. As I’ve set out to understand what happens when we balance, what I’m finding is an incredibly overwhelming field of study. The bad news is, like many other things in the body, balance begins to degrade as soon as we reach our 30’s unless we consistently challenge it. The good news is, balance is highly trainable, and it’s never too late to start (p.6 McCredie, Balance, In Search of the Lost Sense).
The 6th and 7th Senses
Our senses are like “conduits from the external world to the internal world of the brain” (p.101 McCredie). We all are familiar with the original five senses: taste, touch, vision, hearing, and smell. There are two more that are now being included in conversations about our senses—proprioception and our vestibular sense. Proprioception is a sensory system working on a subconscious level allowing us to process where our body is in space at any given time. Sense receptors located in our joints, muscles, and skin are constantly informing the brain about any movement or positional changes in the body as related to the musculoskeletal system. The brain uses this information to allow us to do things like stepping over a large puddle of water and clearing it without a splash, or reaching for a cup of coffee and successfully grabbing it and bringing it up to our mouth to take a sip, all without thinking about it consciously. Then there’s the vestibular sense, our sense that keeps us upright in relation to gravity, our spacial orientation, our balance.
Balance is a Combination of Senses
While balance itself might be considered its own sense, it’s actually the product of three of our senses working together—the proprioceptive, visual, and vestibular senses. Challenge your proprioception by standing on a soft and padded surface, and staying upright becomes harder. Challenge your vision by closing your eyes, and staying upright becomes much harder still. Challenge your vestibular system by spinning around in a chair five times, you’ll likely tumble to the ground. The fascinating part is how these three systems work together as a team, coordinating with one another and picking up each other’s slack, if you will. If it’s dark outside, your proprioceptive and vestibular systems provide more information to the brain to account for lack of visual accuracy. If hiking along a rocky and slippery trail, your visual and vestibular systems will contribute more to keeping you upright (p.66 McCredie). If one system is not working optimally on a regular basis, compensatory patterns will ensue and physical symptoms such as vertigo, migraines, neck/upper back tension, regular trips/falls can occur.
The Vestibular Sense
So, what IS the vestibular system exactly? The vestibular system is responsible for your sense of gravity, and therefore, your ability to remain upright regardless of changes in your environment. What does that mean? It means that we know where up and down are. It means that we can move our head and stay focused on one object at the same time—the vestibulo-ocular reflex, or VOR. It means we can walk in a straight line. It means we can walk in a certain direction and have a sense of how to get back to where we started (p.117 McCredie).
The vestibular organ is actually part of the inner ear and is the only organ exclusively dedicated to balancing functions. The organ is made of two saclike structures and three circular canals. All five parts are filled with tiny hair cells as well as either fluid or crystals that constantly move around based on our head position. The hair cells detect movement of the head when they come into contact with the fluid (in the canals) or the crystals (in the two sacs). The movement detected by the hair cells turns into a neural signal that’s sent to the brain informing it about the location of our head in space. The brain then informs our eyes, our spine and other parts of our body to reflexively move to accommodate the head’s new position (Physiology, Vestibular System, 2018).
Fun Facts
Although hearing isn’t considered to be one of the three systems that affect balance, the inner ear organ and the vestibular organ do share a common nerve to the brain suggesting that one system can impact the other (p.83 McCredie).
Being able to detect gravity is one of the most fundamental properties for an animal to sense, and therefore, the vestibular system is one of the most ancient systems in evolution. It is subsequently, the first system to develop in the womb! (p.83 McCredie)
Due to the mechanism of the hair cells in the vestibular organ, change of direction and change in speed are both detected, but constant speed is not. That’s why you don’t feel like you’re moving when you’re flying in a plane at a constant speed, or you don’t feel the speed of a high quality elevator shooting up to the 25th floor.
I’m hardly in the kindergarten stage of learning about this magnificent system (maybe I’m still in the equivalent of daycare). But, there are many resources pointing me in the direction toward working with balance with those in their later years, injury rehabilitation, and chronic pain. Stay tuned if you’re interested, or reach out with questions I may not be able to answer yet, but I welcome all prompts for internet rabbit holes.
keep moving.
xoxo